


a starless sea

by maricolous



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hugs, Isolation, Past Character Death, The Astral Plane, Trauma, beau and cad try to talk about feelings without Talking About Feelings, spoilers for c2e105
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:15:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25859578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maricolous/pseuds/maricolous
Summary: Caduceus has always appreciated the honesty Beau has about her. Even her lies are based in truth, and he prides himself on being able to see right through them most of the time. She’s become even more honest over time, though, to a point that he envies it.
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 4
Kudos: 86





	a starless sea

**Author's Note:**

> caduceus: continues to repress his emotions  
> me: bro come on bro don't do this
> 
> anyway i've been feeling a lot about cad and beau recently and how they're both emotional rocks for the group in different ways and also how beau has evolved as a character and how caduceus hasn't quite reached the point of realising that he can be open with his emotions! so i originally wrote this for caddy week and then rewrote it after HOLY WEAPON....IN SPAAAAAACE! happened, so the topic of conversation is more specific than it originally was, but i like this better.
> 
> one day i'll get around to writing romantic ship fic for this fandom but until then...pink boy feelings ONLY

Later, when they have a chance to breathe, Beau drops onto the tree stump next to Caduceus. Her knuckles are shiny and pink, new skin already tender because there was no time to heal them fully before dealing with everything else that came after Vokodo.

“You should wrap your hands,” Caduceus says, reaching inside himself and finding barely enough magic to look for undead, let alone heal her further. “You don’t want them to get infected.”

“I’ll do it before we sleep. Letting them get some air,” she sighs, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

Caduceus has always appreciated the honesty Beau has about her. Even her lies are based in truth, and he prides himself on being able to see right through them most of the time. She’s become even more honest over time, though, to a point that he envies it. Her exhaustion is plain to see in the way she holds herself, head bowed and eyes shadowed underneath. The slump to her shoulders isn’t defeat but a simple show of how long a day it’s been.

Watching her makes Caduceus feel the ache in his own muscles, the way his shoulders are tense from sitting up straight and the faint throbbing in his temples from the way his jaw has been clenched through everything they’ve done since entering Vokodo’s lair.

He watches her, the vulnerable curve of her neck, and lets his own shoulders slump forward, just a little.

“The astral plane, huh,” Beau says. “That was pretty fucked up, wasn’t it?”

It’s enough to drive his shoulders back again. Of course.

“Would you like to talk about it?” Caduceus asks, focusing on the sound of the waves to one side and evening birdsong to the other, in order to keep his voice steady and calm.

“I mean, kinda yeah,” Beau says, turning her head to look at him. “Don’t you?”

Two words, innocuously spoken, and he’s there again in his mind. The details are already fuzzy around the edges and changing with every moment he thinks about it, but the changes get worse instead of better. When he was there, he’d been sure the dark shape coming his way was an astral dreadnought. After Vokodo’s dying vision, he isn’t so sure. Perhaps the shape hadn’t been as organic as he assumed. Did it have spires towering above it, as it made its way over to him, driven by its need to consume? Would he have been eaten if Jester hadn’t dropped the spell as soon as she realised it had ricocheted and hit him?

“Ah, hm,” he says, when Beau nudges his arm with his elbow, pulling him back to the present. “You can, if you’d like.”

“I mean, we were both there, right?” Beau asks, straightening up to stretch her back and shoulders. She looks at him and he wonders if this is what others feel when he looks at them, a sense of being known. It isn’t like Vokodo’s gaze, heavy and voyeuristic, but piercing through his calm to look at the scared child inside. “I dunno what you saw in there, but I kinda… I kinda thought I was dead at first.”

This is more comfortable territory, if not completely, and Caduceus latches onto it. “No…no, death is nothing like that. That place was…nothing. For me, death is a warm embrace. The Wildmother’s. I think, regardless of who we worship, the end will greet us with warmth and love, if we do our best.”

“Poetic,” Beau says, flexing her hands with a careful wince. He itches to let the Wildmother’s power flow through his fingertips into her knuckles. “I don’t know what I believe in. But, uh, I figured it out before I popped back out. I looked around, though, didn’t see you. I guess we ended up in different places.”

“It’s a vast plane,” Caduceus says. “And you had no reason to know I would be there. Did you…see anything, while you were there?”

Beau frowns. “Yeah. Pretty far below me. Something…big.”

Caduceus can’t stop the full body shudder when Beau says it and he knows, the way he does, that it’s the same thing that he saw.

She gives him a piercing look again. “Did you see anything?”

“Something big,” Caduceus agrees. “Coming toward me.”

They both jump a little when the campfire pops loudly, but everyone else does too, Fjord falling off the fallen log he’s sitting on with Jester and Caleb. If Jester’s giggle as she helps him up is a bit hysterical around the edges, no one comments on it. Tomorrow, maybe, Caduceus thinks. He’ll broach the topic of everything that happened, or maybe Beau will. Tonight, the two of them are an island of forced honesty in a sea of liars.

“Fuck,” Beau says, digging the palms of her heels into her eyes hard. “That was fucked up. Whatever that thing was, whatever Vokodo showed us…that was all fucked up. But it wasn’t the worst part.”

“What was?” Caduceus asks, and his hand hovers uncertainly before he lets it fall warm and steady between her shoulder blades. He puts a gentle pressure into the touch for her sake, he tells himself, not to stop his fingers from trembling with the anxiety he can't calm.

“The feeling that I was completely alone,” she says. Her eyes are a little watery, a little red, when she lowers her hands. “That was the most fucked up part. If some weird monster tried to eat me, at least I would have seen something else alive.”

Caduceus thinks of passing seasons in that moment, of sitting to meditate as the last leaves fell and opening his eyes to find a blanket of snow over his stiff, trembling limbs. He thinks of talking to plants, to the tenants of the Grove, and not knowing what they’d said in response, if they’d bothered to respond at all. He thinks of bedrooms gathering dust because he couldn’t bring himself to go in and clean them, and the times he would sleep and wake to find the sky still dark, with no way of telling if it was the same night or if he’d missed a whole day or more.

“Yeah,” he says, before he can come up with something more comforting.

He stiffens in surprise when Beau leans against him but the warmth of her against his side is more reassuring than anything else since his return from the astral plane, and he lets his hand slide around her, arm cradling her in slightly awkward side hug. Beau never asks for comfort, not from him, so it’s the least he can do.

“Yeah,” she echoes.

Another pop from the campfire makes Caleb drop his book, and he hurriedly announces he’s going to bed.

Caduceus watches Beau watch Caleb start casting the dome, and isn’t quick enough to look away when she lifts her head to look at him instead.

“We’re all gonna have to talk about what happened,” she says. “It’s gonna suck.”

“I think we’ll be just fine,” Caduceus says.

It’s a hollow relief that fills him when she nods and looks away to talk to Yasha. The weight of her against him isn’t too bad, though. He lets her stay there until the fire burns low and it’s time for bed. A little comfort is the least Beau deserves. And maybe, he admits as he beds down between Yasha and Fjord, he deserves it too.


End file.
